This heart-stopping, award-sweeping debut feature charts a family’s struggles with the fallout of divorce.
After a bitter divorce, Miriam and Antoine battle for sole custody of their son, Julien. Miriam claims the father is violent but lacks proof. Antoine accuses her of manipulating their son for her own ends. Both sides seem to be hiding something – the truth is buried in deceit and jealousy. Julien becomes a pawn in a tense conflict that brings the family’s fraught past to light.
Winner of prestigious awards at the 2017 Venice Film Festival, including the Silver Lion for best director, Custody is a gripping, tension-filled drama that heralds a stunning new cinematic voice in Xavier Legrand. His mastery of building suspense, supported by exceptional performances, makes this one of the must-see films of 2018.
A time-bomb of a film that crackles with intense emotional involvement. – LA Times
Hurtling drama of a horrific boyhood…Xavier Legrand’s portayal of domestic violence is a singular debut. – The Irish Times★★★★★
Terror tactics and fury blaze in an electric debut. – The Telegraph★★★★★
A portrait of a marriage made in hell. – The Guardian★★★★
France, 2017 |Language: French | 94 minutes | Cert: 15A
Director: Xavier Legrand
Cast: Léa Drucker, Denis Ménochet, Thomas Gioria
A short Irish film, An Island [13 minutes] will be shown before the feature.
THIS FILM IS SHOWN IN THE GATE CINEMA ON NORTH MAIN STREET. START TIME IS 8:30PM.
A highlight of Season 19 is Cork Cine Club’s partnership with Cork Film Festival to present Crystal Swan in the Gate Cinema on North Main Street.
This energetic debut from Belarusian director Darya Zhuk is about young Veyla living in post-Soviet 1997 Minsk. She dreams of moving to America to become a DJ, but her wanderlust is derailed by a typo in a forged U.S. visa application, forcing her to a backwater village where she is determined to fake her way to the American dream.
The debut feature of Belarusian director Darya Zhuk, is the sort of blazing triumph that would hold even the sleepiest film festival-goer in rapt attention. – RogerEbert.com
The kooky scenario at the heart of vibrant this comedy could be lifted from a Seinfeld episode…sweet and salty with a screwball zip. – The Skinny
Impressively assured for a first feature, Crystal Swan boasts a luminous lead performance from rising Russian screen queen Alina Nasibullina, and a sparky, sardonic script. – Hollywood Reporter
A gripping drama about an Iraq veteran father and his daughter who take refuge from society deep in an Oregon forest. A war movie made without a shot fired in anger by the director of multi-award-winning Winter’s Bone.
Will, a war veteran suffering from PTSD and his teenage daughter, Tom, have lived off the grid for years in the forests of Portland, Oregon. When their idyllic life is shattered, both are put into social services. After clashing with their new surroundings, Will and Tom set off on a harrowing journey back to their wild homeland. Intense and touching performances from Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie [Tom] and Ben Foster [Will].
Directed by Debra Granik, and adapted from the 2009 novel, My Abandonment, by Peter Rock.
In 1971 Switzerland where women were still denied the right to vote, a housewife finds herself leading her remote village’s suffragette movement. A feel-good film about political awakening. Winner of Audience Award, Tribeca Film Festival.
When dutiful wife and mother Nora is forbidden by her husband to take a part-time job, her frustration leads to her becoming the poster child of her village’s suffragette movement. Nora’s newfound celebrity brings humiliation, threats, and the potential end to her marriage. Refusing to back down, she convinces the women in her village to go on strike and makes some startling discoveries about her own liberation. An uplifting and captivating time-capsule.
There is something moving, and timely too, in the story of an inspirational wave of feminists threatening the status quo, fearlessly braving ridicule, mockery and the backlash against them. – The Guardian★★★
An exceptionally warm crowd-pleaser of a movie. – rogerebert.com★★★
Harry Dean Stanton shines in his final role as Lucky, a cantankerous, desert-dwelling, chain-smoking 90-year-old atheist. A heartening meditation on mortality, human connectedness and enlightenment.
Having out lived and out smoked his contemporaries, this fiercely independent atheist’s life has revolved around a daily routine of yoga, crossword puzzles, TV game shows, and cigarettes. But as he contemplates the end of life, Lucky finds himself on a late journey of self-exploration.
Harry Dean Stanton’s final on-screen performance is funny, touching and beguiling, and particularly poignant in the knowledge that he passed away just days before the film’s US cinema release. It’s an award-winning first feature from actor-turned-director John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, Zodiac).
No one who cares about movies and those rare actors who can elevate them into something unforgettable would dream of missing this scrappy, loving tribute to a virtuoso. – Rolling Stone
A child’s sense of wonder is at the heart of Sean Baker’s joyful story of people living on the impoverished fringes of Florida’s tourist traps. –★★★★★
“The Florida Project is a song of innocence and of experience: mainly the former. It is a glorious film in which warmth and compassion win out over miserabilism or irony, painted in bright blocks of sunlit colour like a child’s storybook and often happening in those electrically charged magic-hour urban sunsets that the director Sean Baker also gave us in his zero-budget breakthrough Tangerine.
This also has the best child acting I have seen for years in its humour and its unforced and almost miraculous naturalism. These kids don’t look cute or over-rehearsed or rehearsed at all; they look as if everything they do and every word that comes out of their mouths is unscripted and real. Yet what they do also has the intelligence and artistry of acting. In his own grownup role, Willem Dafoe gives a performance of quiet excellence and integrity.
The drama is set in a budget motel in Florida in the shadow of Walt Disney World: one of many long-stay welfare places for transients and mortgage defaulters. But, for the little kids who live there, this rundown place does look weirdly like paradise, a place where one summer they enjoy pure, magical freedom, running around its walkways and stairwells and far afield into Florida’s unofficial countryside. These kids do something that is a distant memory for most of us: they roam (a word I hadn’t even thought of for years before seeing this film) just the way children were supposed to in some former age. They wander from dawn to dusk and have fun.
Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is a fearless six-year-old girl whose mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) has failed to get work waitressing or lapdancing. Soon Halley may have to resort to a more obviously lucrative evening business from her motel room. As for Moonee, she can just hang out endlessly with loads of other kids like her friend Scooty (Christopher Rivera), whose own mom lets them have leftover food from the diner where she works.
Dafoe plays Bobby, the hotel manager, who is perennially irritated with late-paying, trash-talking Halley but looks out for her and is a veritable catcher in the rye for Moonee and all the other little kids.
There is an adult narrative thread running through The Florida Project, a narrative of disillusion and suppressed fear; but it comes encased in the children’s heedless, directionless world of fun.
Sean Baker creates a story that is utterly absorbing and moves with its own easy, ambient swing. He has the gift of seeing things from a child’s view. There is a kind of genius in that.” ★★★★★ – Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian
A vibrant, bold and bright portrayal of American childhood which just has to be seen…among the best films ever made about childhood.★★★★★ – The Irish Times
Ruth Wilson stars in British filmmaker Clio Barnard’s atmospheric and layered drama about the old wounds and bitter new grievances that come to light when a woman returns home to settle the tenancy of her family’s Yorkshire farm.
Five years after her provocative breakthrough, The Selfish Giant, director Clio Barnard returns with a highly atmospheric and emotionally charged drama that proves she is one of England’s most distinctive new voices. With Dark River, Barnard uses the Yorkshire countryside as a beautiful silent witness to the troubling tale of a family that, though previously ripped apart, is now trying to reconcile.
After a 15-year absence, Alice (Ruth Wilson) returns to the family farm following the death of her father. She finds the place in complete disrepair. Her deeply troubled brother, Joe (Mark Stanley), is ostensibly in charge, but appears to be in no state to make smart decisions. The two siblings have become like strangers to each other. Alice, bold and decisive, bolts into Joe’s life, determined to impose order and give the farm a future. Joe bristles at her every move, and sparks fly as years of resentments resurface. Slowly, layers of their past are stripped away to expose a dark secret between them. But life goes on. Landlords come knocking.
Barnard is both an energetic and a reflective filmmaker — deeply poetic, but with a realist’s eye. Here she has carefully brought to life the story of damaged people trying to cope with the past while reassembling their lives. – Toronto International Film Festival
It’s the summer of 1983 in the north of Italy. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet) is a precocious 17-year-old American who spends his days in his family’s 17th century villa lazily transcribing music and flirting with his friend Marzia (Esther Garrel). Oliver (Armie Hammer), a handsome graduate student working on his doctorate arrives as the annual summer intern tasked with helping Elio’s father (Michael Stuhlbarg), an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture.
Elio and Oliver discover a summer that will alter their lives forever.
Directed by Luca Guadagnino, written by James Ivory, and based on the novel by André Aciman.
Luca Guadagnino’s tale of budding gay romance in 1980s Italy is one of the most mesmerizing films of the year. – The Atlantic
This gorgeous gay love story seduces and overwhelms.★★★★★ – The Guardian
THIS FILM HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED TO THURSDAY 26 APRIL. THE ORIGINAL SCREENING DATE WAS 19 APRIL.
Three female flatmates in Tel Aviv fight the constraints of their Muslim faith and families in an inspiring directorial debut.
While films and TV series about the trials and tribulations of female friends living, loving, and working in a big city may be fairly common (‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Girls,’ to name two), Arab-Israeli writer-director Maysaloun Hamoud refreshes the genre’s tropes with her energetic feature.
Layla, Salma, and Nour – three Palestinian women with Israeli citizenship – share an apartment in the vibrant center of Tel Aviv. Despite being ‘independent’, each of them struggles with the restrictions imposed on their lives by a blinkered society
What makes this spiky dram/comedy so compelling are the Palestinian-Israeli protagonists, whose split lives have rarely been depicted on screen. These strong, modern, sexually active women, living away from their families and the weight of tradition, struggle to be true to themselves when confronting the expectations of others.
Director Martin Provost (Violette, Seraphine) unites two of France’s favourite actors in his tender comedy drama about female friendship and rediscovery. Catherine Deneuve and Catherine Frot play very different women whose shaky reconnection after a number of decades allows them to learn valuable life lessons from one another. Claire (Frot) is the conscientious Midwife of the title, a single mother whose reservations and self-restraint have left her living an isolated life. Until the day her deceased father’s ex-girlfriend makes contact. Beatrice (Deneuve) is a free-spirited, professional gambler who wishes to reconnect with Claire’s father. Shocked at the news that he has passed away, she implants herself into Claire’s life instead, bringing chaos, joy and memories of happier times.
‘A bittersweet delight…rich, thoughtful, frequently funny.’ – Screen International
‘Offering plum roles to Catherine Frot and Catherine Deneuve…a crowd-pleaser about friendship, forgiveness and rolling with the punches.’ – Indie Wire
‘Provost has once again proven to be a sensitive and sure-handed director of what used to be called “women’s films,” with this one somewhat of a cross between Douglas Sirk and the Dardennes.’ – The Hollywood Reporter
‘Deneuve and Frot excel as contrasting women with an account to settle in a tale that combines realism and melodrama.’ – ★★★★ The Guardian
SAGE FEMME | France, 2017 | Language: French | 117 minutes | Cert: 15A